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Forget marketable skills, in China you get paid to be white

It’s no secret that some of the people (mostly males) “teaching” “English” in China tend to give the impression that maybe they’re here because they couldn’t hack it in their home countries, where being a Euro-American isn’t considered a marketable job skill. Here’s two first-hand accounts of getting paid to be a foreigner in China in two common but different situations:

@Phoebe — you can send the dumb-looking ones, too. And the college drop-outs. If schools in Shanghai and Beijing don’t want them, no problem; we can send them to a 2nd-tier city where their faces will be plastered on billboards and the sides of buses (see my FB pics). China’s the land of opportunity!

@Dasi — just remember that the vast majority of your foreign coworkers in the English-teaching scene will be males, and many of them will be the kind of males who just came here to get drunk and chase Chinese women because they didn’t rate as highly with the women in their home countries. The Chinese English center I worked at was the most sexist work environment I ever encountered.

@Chuck — he just might, to do a PhD in Chinese poetry at a school in the States. He’s already applied to a couple, I think. The foreigner gigs he wrote about are just to get him through the summer. You never met Hannah or Lindy, I think, but they also got paid to sit in an office and look foreign. We’re hooking up all our foreign friends with easy “jobs” this summer!